1. I gutted Norton out of all my machines and replaced
it with the new Microsoft Windows OneCare - everything is running faster and
more smoothly and so far, at least as safely. But there's one bit of
functionality missing - so...

I'm looking for a utility that's an effective banner
blocker and nothing else. I'm compelled to stick with MSIE, so a different
browser won't be a good choice for me. And I don't want to duplicate other
utilities already here to block pop-ups, ad-ware, etc. So I'm looking for a
recommendation on something that is a very single-purpose banner blocker -
especially if there's a way for me to update its reference database - and
doubly especially if it has its own mechanism for occasional updates.

2. Synchronizers tend to suck. Way too many build in
no way to filter which of my Outlook contacts they'll transport. And when I
try to do an N-dimensional synch - my main desktop Outlook to cell phones,
notebooks (sometimes several) or PDAs (not that I have one) - they all get
confused, especially when messages get deleted, moved or handled as spam.
Has anybody ever found a world-class synch program for my scenario?

Thanks

Martin Winston

I use a virtual drive situation with OneNote,
but otherwise I don't use synchronization -- indeed that's one reason I gave
up on carrying a PDA. I find that the best PDA is my TabletPC with the
current Outlook.pst.

===================

Subject: D Day thoughts

Indeed it is well to remember a few things about what
these United States Of America accomplished on dune 6, 1944:

On D-Day, the Allies landed around 156,000 troops in
Normandy. The American forces landed numbered 73,000. Ninety-five per cent
of these American soldiers just 912 days earlier, on December 7, 1941, had
been civilians with no military training, experience or even any great
desire to be soldiers.

11,590 aircraft were available to support the
landings. On D-Day, Allied aircraft flew 14,674 sorties. All of these
aircraft had been built in less than three years. Ninety per cent of their
pilots had never flown IN an airplane, much less piloted one, before
December of 1941. Ninety-five per cent of the mechanics and other ground
support personnel who maintained their engines and other systems had never
set foot on an airfield, much less worked on an aircraft, prior to December
of 1941.

Operation Neptune, the naval support operation for the
Overlord landings, involved huge naval forces, including 6939 vessels: 1213
naval combat ships, 4126 landing ships and landing craft, 736 ancillary
craft and 864 merchant vessels. Some 195,700 personnel were assigned to
Operation Neptune: 52,889 US, 112,824 British, and 4988 from other Allied
countries. A third of the ships were from the navy of these United States of
America. 80% of those ships had been built since December, 1941. Ninety
percent of the seamen and eighty per cent of the officers manning those
vessels of war had never crewed more than a rowboat prior to December, 1941.
A third of them had never seen the ocean before December 7, 1941.

A pipeline was laid under the ocean to carry fuel and
lubricants to the allied forces. Two pre-fabricated harbors had been
designed, built and towed through one of the most treacherous bodies of
water in the world and installed on the Channel coast of France while under
enemy fire.

All of this, and more, done in 912 days. All of it
done without electronic computers. All of it done without fax machines,
without cell phones, without voice mail, all of it done with manual
typewriters and mechanical calculators and reams of paper and legions of men
and women filing and stamping and checking and rechecking and working as if
their lives depended on it. As if!

And today, with all our wealth and technology, our
"leadership" tells us we cannot control our own borders, we cannot find
Americans willing, at any price, to hew wood, draw water and break stone,
that tell us daily that we cannot build a nation fit for heroes and the
children of heroes without foreign labor to bake our daily bread.

The American military, despised in the 1920s and
1930s, under funded, officered by men who often came from the despised rural
regions of the country. rose to the task and, for better or worse, did the
job they were asked to do. Then they laid down their weapons, dismantled
their armies and fleets, and returned to their plows, by and large.

When the leader of this great effort in due time rose
to the chief magistracy of these united States, his final speech to the
nation he had served so honorably was not a summation of military horns and
laurels, all his to rest on, and more. No, he used that auspicious moment to
warn his nation of the danger of the military if allowed too great an
influence in society.

And today again the United States military is often
mocked, easily despised, and all too often given tasks as "impossible' D Day
in 1944. And it still accomplishes them.

You want industrialization of space? A moon colony? An
outpost on Mars? Give the job to the military. While you whine about the
militarization of space, they will quickly and efficiently accomplish it,
and then hand the keys to your new world to you. And then return to their
barracks.

We do not deserve them. We never have. But they are
the best we have.

Petronius The Arbiter Of Taste

Indeed. Thanks.

==================

A constitutional inquiry:

Dr. Pournelle,

I have a thought-exercise you might be able to help
with.

I swore an oath to defend the constitution of the
United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic.

My current highest ranking superior in my direct chain
of command has proposed a constitutional amendment that would provide the
constitutional justification for a set of existing and future laws
discriminating against a class of people based on sex. This amendment would
directly contradict existing constitutional guarantees of equal protections
under the law, namely that in laymans terms, no law shall be passed that
discriminates (either by inclusion or exclusion) on the basis of race, sex,
or religion (creed).

The background behind this little thought experiment
is that I recently realized that the majority of the justification behind
banning same-sex marriages fall into two disturbing categories. The first
set are the exact same justifications that were used to justify racial
discrimination, and I won't rehash those. The second set of justifications
however, based around the idea that the legal concept of marriage is
intended solely to give protections and benefits to couples who can
self-generate offspring (have children), would by logical extension forbid
me and my wife to be "married" because we are (so far) unable to have
children together.

That realization, that the arguments used to justify
the sex-based discrimination behind the legal concept of marriage would
apply to me and my wife, was only a hot burning ember in the back of my mind
until our President proposed a constitutional amendment with the intent to
create a specific case where it is constitutionally acceptable to
discriminate on the basis of sex alone. I don't have to tell you the risks
inherent in passing such an amendment...

If my direct superior carried out an act such as this,
I would be legally bound to act. At what point in my chain of command am I
permitted by my oath and legal contract with the US Government to ignore a
direct assult on the rights and legal protections guaranteed by the US
Constitution? Is it because he is a civilian? If so, what about an equal
constitutional challenge generated by the Secretary of Defense? How about a
member of the Joint Chiefs of Staff? How about a retired General officer?
Would an attempt to do the same thing, alter the constitution to allow legal
discrimination on the basis of sex, by a foreign entity, be allowable?

Anyhow, it's something that's been on my mind. As a
matter of fact, various similar issues have been on the minds of mid-level
officers for as long as I've been in the service (16 years), and although
the topic seems to come up more and more often I've never heard a good
answer.

Fuel for the discussion is the recent Supreme Court
decision that appears to remove whistle-blower protections from government
employees. By extension, this appears to mean that attempting to carry out
the responsibilities of my office would not be afforded any protection from
retribution, so damned if you do and double-damned if you don't... Does this
open the door for an appeal of Calley's conviction, that had he acted to
stop the slaughter at My Lai he would not have been protected from
retribution by his superiors because of the nature of government employment,
as the layman's interpretation of the supreme court decision would appear to
mean?

re: If my direct superior carried out an act
such as this, I would be legally bound to act. At what point in my chain of
command am I permitted by my oath and legal contract with the US Government
to ignore a direct assault on the rights and legal protections guaranteed by
the US Constitution?

-- The President proposed to amend the constitution.
Which, if successful, would make the above argument moot.

The good news is that we have a system that
forces the executive to get approval from the legislative for things like
this.

I'm a republican, conservative Christian, pro-life
conservative and even I recognized this as nothing more than pure political
grandstanding without a snowball's chance of passing. The very fact that
President Bush proposed an amendment should tell you something ... it's
almost impossible to amend the constitution, thus it's safe to suggest it
because you know it's not going to happen.

This was pure PR designed to get the media and the
population talking about something other than the mess in the middle east.

June 4, 2006: A Chinese AWACs clone, the KJ-2000,
crashed killing all 40 people on board. This was more than just the loss of
a prototype aircraft and its crew, for 35 of those on board were engineers
and scientists involved in developing and, in this case, testing the systems
installed on the KJ-2000. Even the Chinese media noted that the government
was very upset at this particular accident, and an investigation into how it
happened is under way.

John

=======

Subject: Re: Petronius's email
Tuesday 6th

Agreed. The UK and the US do not
deserve their respective militaries. And there is, in my opinion, one other
country that has a military as magnificent as these two countries’. I refer
to Israel. After all, they have been at war for fifty-eight years now.

I submit that the UK’s military
deserves even more respect. At least you Americans give your troops the
tools they need; we do not. Our government appears to be more interested in
helping the feckless and criminal.

But despite all that, one point
needs to be made, which I will illustrate with Colonel Collins’ famous
speech:

We go to liberate, not to
conquer.

We will not fly our flags in
their country

We are entering Iraq to free a
people and the only flag which will be flown in that ancient land is their
own.

Show respect for them.

There are some who are alive at
this moment who will not be alive shortly.

Those who do not wish to go on
that journey, we will not send.

As for the others, I expect you
to rock their world.

Wipe them out if that is what
they choose.

But if you are ferocious in
battle remember to be magnanimous in victory.

Iraq is steeped in history.

It is the site of the Garden of
Eden, of the Great Flood and the birthplace of Abraham.

Tread lightly there.

You will see things that no man
could pay to see

-- and you will have to go a long
way to find a more decent, generous and upright people than the Iraqis.

You will be embarrassed by their
hospitality even though they have nothing.

Don't treat them as refugees for
they are in their own country.

Their children will be poor, in
years to come they will know that the light of liberation in their lives was
brought by you.

If there are casualties of war
then remember that when they woke up and got dressed in the morning they did
not plan to die this day.

Allow them dignity in death.

Bury them properly and mark their
graves.

It is my foremost intention to
bring every single one of you out alive.

But there may be people among us
who will not see the end of this campaign.

We will put them in their
sleeping bags and send them back.

There will be no time for sorrow.

The enemy should be in no doubt
that we are his nemesis and that we are bringing about his rightful
destruction.

There are many regional
commanders who have stains on their souls and they are stoking the fires of
hell for Saddam.

He and his forces will be
destroyed by this coalition for what they have done.

As they die they will know their
deeds have brought them to this place. Show them no pity.

It is a big step to take another
human life.

It is not to be done lightly.

I know of men who have taken life
needlessly in other conflicts.

I can assure you they live with
the mark of Cain upon them.

If someone surrenders to you then
remember they have that right in international law and ensure that one day
they go home to their family.

The ones who wish to fight, well,
we aim to please.

If you harm the regiment or its
history by over-enthusiasm in killing or in cowardice, know it is your
family who will suffer.

You will be shunned unless your
conduct is of the highest -- for your deeds will follow you down through
history.

We will bring shame on neither
our uniform or our nation.

The British military has, by and
large, lived up to the ideals expressed in this speech. The American has
not. The British have their ferocious, vicious killers who give no quarter
in battle, and expect none. So do the Americans. But the British know when
the killing should stop, and the Americans do not. And that fact gives aid
to the enemy.

"What we really need is a Constitutional
Amendment that leaves all these matters to the States, and bars judges from
using the US Constitution as a basis for changing the will of the State
Legislature in most social matters. I don't know how to draft that
Amendment, but it would return the issues of Education, Religion and
Separation of Church and State, Abortion, and nearly all such issues to
State Legislatures."

The United States Constitution says...

"Amendment X The powers not delegated to the
United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are
reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.

"Amendment XI The judicial power of the United
States shall not be construed to extend to any suit in law or equity,
commenced or prosecuted against one of the United States by citizens of
another State, or by citizens or subjects of any foreign state."

Unfortunately a new amendment restating what
Amendments X and XI already say is no more likely to be honored than the
original two.

Cheers!

Charles Brumbelow

I have often said that we ought to have a new set
of Amendments: the first ten, then another that says "Shall not be deprived
of the equal protection of the laws because of race or color", and a final
twelfth that says "And this time we really mean it."

Congress shall make no law respecting an
establishment of religion. Etc.

That would leave religion, and most of the legal
procedures, up to the states; leave social measures to the states; and start
us back toward a Federal Republic.

Ah well.

==========

And close today with an open-ended question worth
taking up when we have more time:

Subject: Great Things -

Evening Jerry,

Here's a bit of a strange question for you - what
great things are left to do? And can they be done?

This week the History channel has been running a
series on the Revolution, and the National Geographic Channel a series on
the space race to the moon. Both were great ventures in human history, with
true meaning in the history of mankind. But what's left - or perhaps more
appropriately - what do we have the will to do?

I'm reminded of a question from Revenge of the Nerds:
"Would you rather live in the ascendancy of a civilization or it's decline?"
Do we have a choice?

I fear that the passion, the drive, the sheer force of
will to do great things has passed into history. Today we are focused more
on making a quick buck and what Brittney Spears is doing with her kid than
on Great Things. Are there truly momentous adventures left to us? And do we
have the will - both personal and societal - to pursue them? Is there
anything left? Or are we doomed to a relatively meaningless (in the grand
scheme of things) existence?

To what would we pledge our lives, our fortunes, and
our sacred honor?

What I said was that I know a diet on which you can
eat all you want as often as you want, so long as you eat only the one
thing: Purina Monkey Chow.

It works. You won't overeat. Believe me. As a
graduate student I ate monkey chow one day a week (I was animal room
manager) to save money. It saved money, and I certainly didn't gain weight.

==========

Subject: Constitutional Amendment

Jerry,

You said, "I have often said that we ought to have a
new set of Amendments: the first ten, then another that says "Shall not be
deprived of the equal protection of the laws because of race or color", and
a final twelfth that says "And this time we really mean it."

I'd make it even simpler. I'd get rid of all of the
amendments and put in just one.

"There is nothing implied in any paragraph of this
document."

There's nothing explicitly in there about controlling
speech, so they can't. Nothing about controlling guns, so they can't.
NOTHING about the courts being able to strike down or write new laws, so
they can't. Nothing about federally-funded schools or a federal police force
or who can give how much to Congress-critters for electioning or...

Braxton S. Cook

That was the position of Alexander Hamilton and
others who opposed adding the Bill of Rights: they said that the document
said everything not permitted was forbidden, but the Bill of Rights would be
interpreted as saying everything not forbidden was permitted.

<snip> if there's global warming, it might be a
godsend. According to Harvard astrophysicist Sallie Baliunas, added carbon
dioxide helps plants grow. Warmer winters give farmers a longer growing
season, and the warming might end the droughts in the Sahara desert.

There's another consideration. For the past 800,000
years, there have been periods of approximately 100,000 years called Ice
Ages, followed by a period of 10,000 years, a period called Interglacial,
followed by another Ice Age. We're about 10,500 years into the present
Interglacial period, namely, we're 500 years overdue for another Ice Age. If
indeed mankind's activity contributes to the planet's warming, we might
postpone the coming Ice Age.

<snip>

Jim

============

"I fear that the passion, the drive, the
sheer force of will to do great things has passed into history. Today we
are focused more on making a quick buck and what Brittney Spears is
doing with her kid than on Great Things. Are there truly momentous
adventures left to us? And do we have the will - both personal and
societal - to pursue them?"

I'm not sure that that empires are built by people who
have the will to do great things. They may be maintained by them. The
British Empire was built up in the pre-Victorian era & most of the builders
were a bunch of freebooters - not unlike the robber barons who built up
American capitalism.

"SO IF THE Myrdals were right when they said that if the welfare state
couldn't work in Sweden, it wouldn't work anywhere, what will it mean if
Sweden's system fails? The answer seems obvious."

For a long time academics have used the
Scandinavian socialist states as an example of how socialism can be made to
work. This looks into why it did work and why it isn't exportable -- and
probably not sustainable.

My Scandinavian ancestors have done great things.
They have also made great mistakes. But I certainly don't want them angry
with me.

============

Subject: AI on the Hill

From a report in "Inside Higher ED" on the House
Science Committee. As I understand this, the Representative wants high
school science students to be taught to fear rogue computers that may take
over the world.

"Rep. Brad Sherman (D-Calif.) did not propose an
amendment, but wanted further discussion and perhaps a report on a
particular aspect of future supercomputing research. Sherman said that,
based on the opinions of experts, there is reason to believe that in about
25 years a supercomputer will be built that “exceeds human intelligence.”
Sherman said he hopes that some of the future researchers that the bills
would cultivate will be steered toward the potentially emerging field of
making sure that the super-intelligent computers “avoid self-awareness … and
ambition,” he said."

One of the rarest of meteorological phenomena, the
circumhorizon arc is a type of rainbow that forms in high (20,000 ft) cirrus
clouds under the proper conditions of sunlight and ice crystal formation in
the cloud. This one, covering "hundreds of square miles," was photographed
on the Washington-Idaho border on Saturday, June 3, 2006.

>Over in mail we have another example of
Pournelle's Iron Law of
>Bureaucracy at work. I have written the basic description of the Iron
>Law so many times that I want to put it down with its own title so I
>can refer to it in future:

>Pournelle's Iron Law of Bureaucracy states
that in any bureaucratic
>organization there will be two kinds of people: those who work to
>further the actual goals of the organization, and those who work for
>the organization itself. Examples in education would be teachers who
>work and sacrifice to teach children, vs. union representative who
>work to protect any teacher including the most incompetent. The Iron
>Law states that in all cases, the second type of person will always
>gain control of the organization, and will always write the rules
>under which the organization functions.

They say that the rain falls on the just and unjust
alike. Perhaps the bureaucratic organization member of the first type (the
goal directed one) feels that the "protection" offered by their
bureaucracy-directed peers is similar to the rain in this respect. Perhaps
they see the bureaucrats' protection, including protection offered to the
incompetent or otherwise unworthy, as part of what makes their own
contributions possible. Perhaps there are people outside of their
organization who also feel this way.

My own take on such glaringly obvious phenomena as
your iron law is not generally to advance yet another iron law that
empirically demonstrates that humyn nature is inherently--fill in the blank
with whatever adjective satisfies the requirements of one's own
ideology--selfish, violent, bureaucratic, oligarchic, territorial,
irrational, rational, economic, least-resistance, hierarchical, unequal,
etc. My own take on the obvious is that a teaching organization is a "group
entity" (which is to say an entity that is not an individual humyn being, or
organism) or what I tend to call an "institution." The board of education
that they try to bargain with collectively is also an institution. So are
competing (or enemy) institutions such as Mr. Whipple's infamous "Channel
One" media organization or Mr. Edison's infamous charter schools. The battle
lines between the individual and institutional realms knows no "sectors."

Just as self defense provides an exception to the rule
that Violence is Bad, economic self defense in the form of attempted
cartelization provides an exception to the rule that "free" markets are
inherently good. Success at cartelization or the getting of "market power"
is said by adherents to (neo)classical and (neo)liberal doctrines is
theoretically impossible, anyway, so what are the free market
fundamentalists afraid of, anyway? The labor movement as a whole is a case
study in failure. The teacher unions are one of a small and shrinking number
of such dominoes still standing. Their union is being busted successfully
every day by smiling salescritters selling privatization packages to school
boards all over America. So, instead of being run by institutions called
school boards or teacher unions, the kids depend on for-profit or
for-prophet institutions that have agendas that go well beyond misguided
attempts at market power. As institutions, they're every bit as inherently
bureaucratic and oligarchic as the ones they replace.

If you want an education, start studying. For things
you can't learn from books, find some people. The trick, of course, is
persuading them (given the Tanstaafl and therefore Evil universe we live in)
that sharing their knowledge with you is something they can afford to do.

People of the "growth is good" religion claim that
what people can afford depends on how much wealth they have. I am of the
belief that it depends a lot more an how little scarcity they have. If the
badness of scarcity didn't trump the goodness of wealth, the American (or
general humyn) status quo we see today would not be possible. Specifically,
Americans wouldn't fear the Pink Slip, or the nominally even worse
Termination With Cause.

The problem is Power (hierarchy, territorialism,
inequality and/or scarcity, in short the phenomenon of "dominance") itself,
not some bureaucratic tendency in humyn nature. Create a post-scarcity
non-economy in which people have the luxury of being able to afford (there
goes that word again) to treat their colleagues and fellow humyn beings in
general as EQUALS, and your bureaucracy problem should evaporate without a
single shot being fired. Bureaucracy is caused by the fact that some people
have more Power (usually in the form of wealth, which Is Power) than others,
not the fact that some people choose to expheriment with collective as well
as individual strategies for living effectively in spite of the existence of
Power.

Whether it matters or not, this comment comes after my
first visit to your site, so I am not "well read" in Pournelle. The
impression I have so far from cursory readings here is of YET ANOTHER SF
writer advancing the cause of the "libertarian" Right. If I had a penny for
every time some "libertarian" Rightist bopped me over the head with some
hackneyed clich&eacute; to the extent that nobody's holding a gun to my head
to keep going to my crappy temp job or sign some boilerplate (and therefore
Evil) $ell phone contract, or participate in some other private sector
exercise in "voluntarism" that I'd rather not, I'd be quite wealthy by now.
Yet the SF writing profession every few decades or so demonstrates its
redeeming value by producing the occasional LeGuin or Dick. Maybe you guys
need a union.

To the extent that I understand what was said here,
it appears to be an apology for defending the lack of results in schools.

Telling parents who have little education that they
should set their children to becoming autodidacts like Abraham Lincoln might
be great advice for those with bright children, but for those of normal
intelligence and below it is a bit like telling them to win the lottery as a
remedy to poverty.

As to the "Libertarian Right", alas, my Libertarian
friends wish mightily that I were more so. My view is like Larry Niven's:
Libertarianism is a vector, not a destination, and for the moment it's the
right vector for the lot of us: we have far too much interference with
freedom in the name of bureaucracy. To that extent I am a part of the
Libertarian Right, I suppose, but they don't accept me, given my
conservative and reactionary tendencies...

It would probably come as a shock, but Possony and
I were working on "The Strategy of Progress", which defends bureaucracy for
certain purposes. Sometimes a bureaucracy is the only way to bring about
certain results. The problem is that education isn't one of those cases.
Public education requires a very great deal more attention from both public
and private authorities than a bureaucracy can possibly give it. Among other
things, public education requires that those in charge demand results, not
credentials. But that is another story for another time.

In addition to being an SF writer I am a former
aerospace operations research engineer, aviation psychologist, professor of political science,
deputy mayor, campaign manager, and science correspondent.

I've been trying Ghost 10 out to see how it does on my
main development machine. My current project is complex, spanning a USB 2
core in HDL, embedded firmware, Altera and Xilinx FPGA development S/W, a
Windows XP device driver, and a Win32 console application. Whew! Long story
short, stuff is scattered all over my hard drive, a 1TB 4 drive Raid 0
array. Not so easy to do a manual backup. At the end of a development day, I
tell Ghost to make a complete backup. I told Ghost to create a backup set
last week. No each day, what I see is that Ghost takes about 10 minutes to
scan my C and D drives and uses about 2 gigabytes total to save the
differences. I'm using a 500GB Maxtor One Touch III I bought at Fry's as the
backup drive. Ghost is disabled form auto-scanning. I have to manually tell
it to start. I also keep the Maxtor unplugged from the system and turned off
except when I'm using it. Too many Windows Applications just have to spin up
all the drives at odd times, especially Acrobat! Then you end up waiting
while the drives spin up!

So far so good.

Phil

==========

Re: Great Things

"I fear that the passion, the drive, the sheer force
of will to do great things has passed into history. Today we are focused
more on making a quick buck and what Brittney Spears is doing with her kid
than on Great Things. Are there truly momentous adventures left to us? And
do we have the will - both personal and societal - to pursue them?"

Truly momentous adventures? Does anyone who has ever
read your works need to ask, Jerry? Sure, there are great things left to do
– and the will to do them is being hijacked by bean-counters and
bureaucratic empire-builders.

I refer of course to the Great Leap Outwards. I don’t
have any kids and never will, but I would like to think that one of my
sister’s grandchildren or great-grandchildren will have a chance to walk the
snows of Enceladus, or wrestle a drill on some nameless asteroid loaded with
stuff more valuable than gold, or sail a boat on the lake in the first L5
colony, or…

Apart from being a good thing to do for reasons few
reading this will dispute (I hope), I submit that this would also help to
heal the ills of our society. A thought I have often seen stated: One of the
chief causes of our society’s problems is the lack of a frontier; a lack of
somewhere for our troublesome young men to risk getting themselves killed
in, a lack of somewhere to think that you might actually be helping to build
something worth building.

And one way the Great Black Yonder is better than
earlier frontiers; there are no troublesome native inhabitants that anyone
will have to kill, suppress or enslave in order to do it.

As for treasure, well, there is enough and to spare to
make everyone currently living a trillionaire many times over. Not that this
is the way things would turn out; instead, after a couple of hundred years,
if we wished, there would be enough for a trillion people (at least!) to
live in comfort.

Disband NASA, and let’s get started! We have wasted a
generation already!

> Being a farmer's son from Riverside, I know about
falling water tables. The "mining" of water in the American Southwest is not
sustainable.

This reminds me of a documentary I heard on the radio
a few years ago. IIRC, some of the highlights were: - that an early explorer
called the Canadian Prairies unliveable. - Studies of sediment on lake
bottoms in the prairies show the Dust Bowl of the 30's is the second mildest
draught of the last millennium. - The Saskatchewan River today has 1/6th the
flow it did in 1900, and the only reason there is a river in the summer is
glacial meltoff.

I can't find the name of original documentary on the
CBC site, but here is a more recent news story.

Looming drought on Prairies will be worse than Dust
Bowl days of 1930s: experts

Perhaps you have achieved sufficient wisdom that you
can honestly and reasonably try to address a point raised by someone who
advances "humyn nature" into a discussion. Me, I'm pleased that MS Word's
spellcheck still puts a squiggly red line under "humyn." Of course, the
etymologies of "man" and "human" reach back to two entirely different
language families....

Anyway, I think what she meant to write (one sample
paragraph):

'My own take on such glaringly obvious phenomena as
your iron law is not generally to advance yet anothyr iron law that
empirically demonstrates that humyn nature is inhyrently--fill in the blank
with whatever adjective satisfies the requirements of one's own
ideology--selfish, violent, bureaucratic, oligarchic, territorial,
irrational, rational, economic, least-resistance, hierarchical, unequal,
etc. My own take on the obvious is that a teaching organization is a "group
entyty" (which is to say an entyty that is not an individual humyn being, or
organism) or what I tend to call an "instytution." The board of education
that they try to bargain with collectively is also an instytution. So are
competing (or enemy) instytutions such as Mr. Whipple's infamous "Channel
One" media organization or Mr. Edison's infamous charter schools. The battle
lines between the individual and instytutional realms knows no "sectors."'

With such vigorous proponents, I'm shocked that
unions, even teachyr unions, are losing public esteem.

But we can all agree that LeGuin and Dyck are very
good writers.

_ Christian J. Schulte
Deputy District Attorney

==========

Subject: Humyn nature

I confess I didn't quite follow every point in the
humyn nature essay. But I think I got the gist.

On the other hand, I think what you have said about
teacher's unions is clear and easy to follow. Teacher's unions are devoted
to getting the best possible deal for teachers; this is not the same thing
as delivering the best possible education for the students. So, you can be
in favor of giving the kids the best possible education, *or* you can be in
favor of giving the teachers the best possible deal; it's easy to say "the
latter ensures the former" but I don't buy it. If it's difficult to fire
incompetent teachers, how does that help the kids?

As for libertarian thinking: I consider myself a
libertarian. As you say, it's a vector, or in my favorite analogy it's a
train you can ride. Very few people in America today would want to ride that
train all the way to the end of the line, but I'd like to see them ride it
as far as they will go.

Anyway, the libertarian observation on the schools is:
state-run schools are run on tax dollars, thus giving parents the choice of
paying *twice* for schools, and sending their kids to a private school; or
paying just once, and sending their kids to a public school. This makes it
much more difficult for private schools to compete with public schools. If
you rode the train all the way to the end of the line, there would be no
government-run schools; all schools would be private and competing with each
other. If you only ride the train part way, you might have the government
collect tax dollars but then issue vouchers good at any school; this would
at least put all schools on an equal footing to compete. If you ride the
train even less, you might keep the public schools open but issue vouchers
to any parents who want them, and see what happens.

If you want the kids to get the best education
possible, the best thing is to get the schools competing with each other for
students. The best teachers will be in demand; the incompetent teachers will
find it harder to keep a job. This all sounds good to me.

If Libertarianism a vector, then of necessity,
bureaucracy is a vector. The problem becomes that both are the (vector) sums
of a number of component vectors.

In the case of libertarianism, some of those component
vectors are racial equality/egalitarianism, religious freedom, freedom of
consumption (ranging from the choice between vegetariansm and beef
consumption, to freedom regarding narcotic chemicals including alcohol,
tobacco, and marijuana), and economic freedom including tax freedom. The
fallacy of libertarianism, and in particularly of currently organized
libertarianism, is that some of the component vectors are pursued to excess
at the expense of a unified whole (e.g. the drug legalization issue), while
others have been co-opted by wholly non-libertarian influences (e.g.
egalitarianism pursued to the politically correct extent of banning not only
obvious racism, but even complaints that the political correction process
itself is anti-libertarian in form and execution).

In the case of bureaucracy, the Iron Law clearly
delineates two of the most obvious component vectors: pursuit of the
objectives for which the bureaucracy was formed, and pursuit of the
bureaucracy as a structure in its own right. The principle that the Iron Law
enunciates is that in most bureaucracies, the second component will
eventually become the dominant component, and in extreme cases may become
the sole component, at which cases the first component will attain zero
magnitude, or even go negative (the bureaucracy operates contrary to the
objectives of the bureaucracy).

The fact that Public Education has reached the stage
where the bureaucratic component is so dominant that the objective component
is in many locations (an important distinction) net negative or
significantly overdampted is not necessarily a fallacy of the bureaucratic
approach in this case, but it is true that the dismantling of the
bureaucracy (viz. "retirement of the system at the end of the system
lifecycle," to apply a more control-theory oriented terminology) is more
likely to achieve the ostensible objective of the bureaucracy than the
identification and application of appropriate controls to the bureaucracy to
assure that teaching can proceed effectively.

And this is probably as much double speak as your
correspondent's missive.

When I skimmed Lorraine Lee's dissolute and decadent
diatribe (I seldom read anything that screwed up in depth) my impression was
that she was something akin to a distaff version of Rand's Wesley Mouch. A
search for occurances of "humyn" would seem to confirm that taxonomy:

That tells me all I care or need to know about Lee.
And the idea that such a creature has any connection, however remote, to the
task of teaching children pretty much sums up the essential condition (as
well as the genesis of that condition) of public school education today.

-Scott

Which pretty well states the point I was trying to
make in posting that letter. I didn't do it to ridicule Ms. Lee; but alas,
the view she states is not uncommon.

<snip> The hive mind is for the most part
stupid and boring. Why pay attention to it?

The problem is in the way the Wikipedia has
come to be regarded and used; how it's been elevated to such importance
so quickly. And that is part of the larger pattern of the appeal of a
new online collectivism that is nothing less than a resurgence of the
idea that the collective is all-wise, that it is desirable to have
influence concentrated in a bottleneck that can channel the collective
with the most verity and force. This is different from representative
democracy, or meritocracy. This idea has had dreadful consequences when
thrust upon us from the extreme Right or the extreme Left in various
historical periods. The fact that it's now being re-introduced today by
prominent technologists and futurists, people who in many cases I know
and like, doesn't make it any less dangerous. <snip>

We had opening night tickets, but it didn't open on
opening night. Our tickets are for next week. We know some of the singers
and they like it a lot. I will reserve judgment until I have seen it. After
all, I'm an unrepentant Viking...

The teacher's union controls educational departments -
even at conservative confessional Christian colleges. The teacher's union is
not merely a bureaucracy, it is also an ideological faction. It is, in fact,
a militant religion/political organization with an agenda to change American
society and governance. Improving the lives of teachers takes a back seat to
this. Even in a conservative setting, we are taught teacher union rah-rah,
and a very biased, left-wing, anti-Christian view of the history of
education over the past couple millennia. We our taught that our purpose is
to change the beliefs of children to conform them to the Progressivist
agenda. Some texts set as educational standards, the training of children to
engage in political protest, and in pressuring their parents and officials
in society to subsume society under the auspices of the government schools.
If we can use the term "Islamo-facism" even though Muslims do not deny the
transcendent-objective, signified, then perhaps we can coin "edu-facism" for
this agenda of everything for the schools (as defined and controlled by the
unions), nothing outside the schools, and nothing against the schools.

Perhaps there are some lawyers among your readership
that can provide some more detail, but it seems that it is illegal to lie to
federal US agents:

Title 18, United States Code, Section 1001 makes it a
crime to: 1) knowingly and willfully; 2) make any materially false,
fictitious or fraudulent statement or representation; 3) in any matter
within the jurisdiction of the executive, legislative or judicial branch of
the United States. Your lie does not even have to be made directly to an
employee of the national government as long as it is "within the
jurisdiction" of the ever expanding federal bureaucracy. Though the
falsehood must be "material" this requirement is met if the statement has
the "natural tendency to influence or [is] capable of influencing, the
decision of the decisionmaking body to which it is addressed." United States
v. Gaudin, 515 U.S. 506, 510 (1995). (In other words, it is not necessary to
show that your particular lie ever really influenced anyone.) Although you
must know that your statement is false at the time you make it in order to
be guilty of this crime, you do not have to know that lying to the
government is a crime or even that the matter you are lying about is "within
the jurisdiction" of a government agency. United States v. Yermian, 468 U.S.
63, 69 (1984). For example, if you lie to your employer on your time and
attendance records and, unbeknownst to you, he submits your records, along
with those of other employees, to the federal government pursuant to some
regulatory duty, you could be criminally liable.

-- David Magda <dmagda at ee.ryerson.ca> Because the
innovator has for enemies all those who have done well under the old
conditions, and lukewarm defenders in those who may do well under the new.
-- Niccolo Machiavelli, _The Prince_, Chapter VI

I do not like to say this, so perhaps I should put
it in the form of query:

Is this now the best advice? Is this now the best
action?

Since you cannot know when you have committed a
crime while communication with Federal Officials, the safest policy is
to say NOTHING. Do not deny that you have done anything. Say NOTHING to
them. Plead the Fifth Amendment no matter how trivial the question, and
demand that all interviews take place with your lawyer present, at a
time convenient to both of you.

Now that is not the advice I brought my
children up to follow. I always thought it was MY government, and that
cooperation is a civic duty; but it is now clear after the Martha
Stewart case (and others) that one must say NOTHING WHATEVER to ANY
Federal Agent without the advice of counsel. If you are a witness to
something that is legitimately the object of a Federal Investigation,
your safest course is to insist on submitting a written statement,
witnessed and signed which has been vetted by your lawyer, and to make
sure that it contains no speculation, conclusions, inferences, or
statements of opinion.

Note that denying that you have committed an
act which is itself not a crime can send you to jail. Being mistakes
about when you committed actions that are not themselves crimes can send
you to jail. Cooperation with Federal Agents has become a losing
activity.

I have just about decided that I will no longer
answer questions put during security investigations, and no longer
allow myself to be listed as a security reference; my memory is not what it
was, and the likelihood that I will incorrectly recall some incident is
high.

There was a time when we understood what perjury
meant. There was a time when one could and should be proud to cooperate with
the government. That time is, alas, long past. I would that it were not so.

Note that in a Republic it is both reasonable and
necessary to expect the citizens to cooperate, willingly and
enthusiastically, with their government.

Garage chemistry used to be a rite of passage for
geeky kids. But in their search for terrorist cells and meth labs,
authorities are making a federal case out of DIY science.

<snip>

The (Consumer Products Safety Commission's) war on
illegal fireworks is one of several forces producing a chilling effect on
amateur research in chemistry. National security issues and laws aimed at
thwarting the production of crystal meth are threatening to put an end to
home laboratories. In schools, rising liability concerns are making teachers
wary of allowing students to perform their own experiments. Some educators
even speculate that a lack of chem lab experience is contributing to the
declining interest in science careers among young people.

<snip>

The push to restrict access to chemicals by those who
have no academic or scientific credentials gained momentum in the mid-’90s
following the bombing of the federal building in Oklahoma City. In the years
since 9/11, the Defense Department, FBI, and other government agencies have
strategized ways of tracking even small purchases of potentially dangerous
chemicals. “The fact that there are amateurs and retired professors out
there who need access to these chemicals is a valid problem,” acknowledges
Rice University chemistry professor James Tour, who consulted with the
Pentagon and the Justice Department, “but there aren’t many of those guys
weighed against the possible dangers.”

<SNIP>

Ironically, a shadow of suspicion is being cast over
home chemistry at a time when the contributions of amateurs to the progress
of science are highly regarded. In recent years, citizen scientists have
discovered comets and supernovas and invented tools for gauging Earth’s
magnetic field. Peer-reviewed journals like Nature now welcome papers
coauthored by auto-didacts like Forrest Mims III, who studies solar storms
and atmospheric conditions at his home observatory in Texas. Personal
computers, digital cameras, and other consumer electronic devices are
putting more accurate means of recording and measuring phenomena into the
hands of home tinkerers than were available in high-end labs just a few
years ago. The Internet is the ultimate enabling technology, allowing
amateurs to collaborate with their counterparts at NASA and other
organizations.

<snip> (continues through two more pages I haven't
read yet)

JW

I made nitroglycerin at age 11. 'Twas a dangerous
thing to do, and I do not advise anyone to try it.

===========

Letter From Istanbul:

Subject: Your columns

Dear Sir

It is true the your columns are extensively read by
the geeks here. I'm also among those sending links from your site. You and
your seemingly bottomless well of expertise and experience aklways shows in
your all parts of your work. Quality will always out, and will be
appreciated.

Do keep your faith in liberty and the free markets. If
an allegedly "free" market seems to be failing, you can bet the reason is
always a bundle of obtuse regulation that is *rigging* that market and
cartellizing it to the benefit of some invisibly entrenched interest.

I'm of the opinion that had we shaken of our age-old
habits regarding pricing and control of copyrighted material, you'd find an
infinitely wider audience. But most people are reluctant to do that because
they sense that in such an interconnected world the mediocre will be easier
to spot because of its statistical frequencies. In that world, a Pournelle
with books sold for $2.00 will have millions (perhaps tens of millions) of
readers, while others of much lesser intellect and quality who happen to
earn comparable to Pournelle because of a cartelized system will simply go
to the dustbin of history. Which is why there's such a reluctance to go
ahead with such changes.

My two cents.

Kind regards -- KE

=========

Jerry P:

I volunteer at a science museum and find serious
divide between the educated students who come there and the rest, who feel
like it is a recess. I wonder if the difference is due to the majority of
teachers coming from the lower quintile of college graduates, those who
struggled just to survive and not the enthusiastic types who thrive on
information and education. Not that the lower quintile is deficient in the
interest in educating the young, but that they never were pushers and so
don't push their students. I can always tell those students from charter
schools and home schooled students by their approach to the exhibits and
their questions.

IF YOU SEND MAIL it may be published; if you want it private
SAY SO AT THE TOP of the
mail. I try to respect confidences, but there is only me, and this is Chaos Manor. If you
want a mail address other than the one from which you sent the mail to appear, PUT THAT AT
THE END OF THE LETTER as a signature. In general, put the name you want at
the end of the letter: if you put no address there none will be posted, but
I do want some kind of name, or explicitly to say (name withheld).

Note
that if you don't put a name in the bottom of the letter I have to get one
from the header. This takes time I don't have, and may end up with a name
and address
you didn't want on the letter. Do us both a favor: sign your letters to me
with the name and address (or no address) as you want them posted. Also,
repeat the subject as the first line of the mail. That also saves me time.

I try to answer mail, but mostly I can't get to all of it. I read it all, although not
always the instant it comes in. I do have books to write too... I am reminded of H.
P. Lovecraft who slowly starved to death while answering fan mail.

If you want to PAY FOR THIS
PLACE I keep the latest information HERE.
MY
THANKS to all of you who sent money. Some of you went to a lot of
trouble to send money from overseas. Thank you! There are also some new payment methods. I am preparing a special (electronic)
mailing to all those who paid: there will be a couple of these. I have
thought about a subscriber section of the page. LET ME KNOW your thoughts.
.